An Enterprise Approach to Business/IT Alignment
The alignment of business and IT has been a chief management concern for more than two decades. Two recent surveys revealed that it continues to be a top priority for CIOs in 2009. A contributing issue is the lack of functional relationships between business and IT units, complicated by the complexity of the service delivery mechanism. There is also the attitude that a quick application fix, if implemented, will be the magic bullet that solves the problem and increases confidence and collaboration within the business units receiving the IT service. Unfortunately, even if the application is successful, the “quick fix” does not address the fundamental planning and integration issues at the heart of the problem. This article explores an approach for tackling business/IT alignment by combining existing disciplines to leverage the evolving trend to better service management.
Enterprise Architecture and Service Management
Working Together to Drive Success
Bridging the Communication Gap with Effective Collaboration
First, let’s look at why alignment problems occur. In some organizations, alignment difficulties can begin as communication problems when business and technical staff speak different languages and develop differing expectations. In other organizations, politics and control issues cause animosity and misalignment between IT and business staff. As an example, in one global company, IT sponsored an elaborate project with the sole objective of leading business operations to a solution predefined by IT. The project failed to win over its intended audience and further decreased the likelihood of success for any subsequent project.
When relationships between IT and business units are dysfunctional, management often brings in a neutral third party, from inside or outside the organization, to facilitate consensus and develop a collaborative solution between IT and the business stakeholders. From this common interest in the success of the organization, it is possible to build communication and collaboration that is a prerequisite to aligning IT services with business needs.
Effective collaboration is the first step in successful alignment. A collaborative environment ensures that business requirements are understood by the business and IT. Enabling business/IT alignment through effective collaboration requires adherence to three primary principles: trust, communication, and context.
Trust: Having a neutral facilitator who establishes transparency and integrity in dealing with potentially dissenting parties. This means no hidden agendas and full disclosure of issues. It also means absolute confidentiality and nondisclosure of sources, particularly in coercive organizational situations.
Communication: Ensuring that issues are raised and addressed and that all parties have the same understanding of the terminology involved. This frequently involves publishing and maintaining a glossary of terms and ensuring that all parties understand and agree to the terms.
Context: Maintaining and displaying the relationships between components in the project. While IT and the business units will not have the same understanding of all of the components in a project, they must have identical understanding of the components for which IT and the business units have shared responsibilities.
Translating Services to Meet Business Expectations
After achieving collaboration, it is important that business requirements are translated into services that meet business expectations. IT services, in this context, are the benefits generated by the functions of technical systems. The proper definition of individual services is critical to the functioning of the business processes that depend upon these services.
Service definitions focus on the development of the requirements and specifications needed to develop and deploy these services. Unfortunately, business process requirements frequently take on a new life during the design and development process. First, the requirements process fails to document the business problem in a manner that can be correctly interpreted by technical staff. Then the specifications and physical build “drift” from the requirements. Next, the deployment process discovers that last-minute adjustments are required to integrate to the incomplete requirements. Finally, misunderstanding of the business requirements results in a deployment that cannot support service uptime requirements. That means that either the delivered service does not meet business expectations or does not integrate well with other services. From this example it is clear that a robust set of processes and frameworks governing service delivery is needed to prevent service development and deployment problems.
Fortunately, there is help to address this integration. Two complementary disciplines meeting this need are the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF™). While neither service management nor enterprise architecture are new concepts, the business service focus of their latest versions, TOGAF Version 9 and ITIL Version 3, enables a standard, effective approach to integrated service delivery and business/IT unit alignment. Both TOGAF and ITIL have a common focus in the integration of IT services and the business processes that they support. This common service focus enables an integrated approach to aligning business and IT.
- ITIL is an integrated set of best practices that defines how service management is applied within an organization. Being a framework, it is completely customizable for application within any organization that has a reliance on IT infrastructure.
- TOGAF is a framework for an enterprise architecture that provides a comprehensive approach to the design, planning, implementation, and governance of an enterprise information framework. This framework provides an agreed baseline for strategic planning and tactical decision making.
How ITIL and TOGAF Provide Service
Figure 1 illustrates how ITIL and TOGAF components interact to provide service.
In this example, the executive committee establishes goals and strategies that are then translated into an actionable architecture framework to support them. The framework is created by the enterprise architect and stored in an architecture repository. When a customer requests a new service, following governance approval, the appropriate “architecture building blocks” are used by the solutions architect in collaboration with applications development to construct the specifications appropriate to the request. These specifications and the customer requirements are used by the applications group to develop, acquire, or modify the software required to produce the requested service. The validated application is deployed by IT operations using ITIL change, release, and configuration management procedures, thereby supplying the requested service to the customer in alignment with customer requirements and executive oversight.
Integrated Service Support
Starting with ITIL and TOGAF basic definitions and context, enterprise architects can map subject areas and processes between the two disciplines to ensure optimal integration occurs. This view, which casts ITIL in an operational role and TOGAF as the enterprise-wide strategic framework, is directly adaptable to most current environments. Because the subject area for enterprise architecture is the entire enterprise, and the subject area for ITIL is delivery of IT services, we can easily map processes and integration points using ITIL as the IT service delivery mechanism and TOGAF as the enterprise “umbrella” framework. This integrated view enables collaborative roles across the enterprise as primary business units and IT service delivery functions have defined points of interaction throughout the service delivery cycle, from business strategy to service retirement. The model in figure 2, derived from ITIL- and TOGAF-based IT service models, illustrates the potential for integrating these frameworks.
Figure 2 depicts the high level activities and information flow in an integrated TOGAF / ITIL environment.
While service delivery and enterprise architecture are shown as separate layers, when integrated they map as a single layer with collaboration between business units, enterprise architecture, applications development, and IT operations for development of a new service. Implicit in this model are the processes for managing requirements, processes, and applications components to ensure efficiency and reuse.
Further opportunities for integration may be found by examining the information required to manage service delivery. In ITIL, a prerequisite to service delivery is a service portfolio consisting of a documented set of business processes and enabling business services supported by a documented set of IT services. The IT services are contained in an IT service catalog that includes services in conceptual, design, and development phases and those services deployed and retired, all managed under a common governance structure. ITIL promotes the development of service catalogs to enable improved communication, easier access to IT services, and measurement-driven, continuous process improvement. The TOGAF framework provides the repository and standards that ensure that processes are persistent, consistent, and nonredundant.
A Model-driven Plan for Alignment
A picture is worth a thousand words. Defining IT services is a complex process. Delivering IT services involves additional layers of complexity. Models such as these enable organizations to manage this complexity productively. Detail components are captured and maintained within the context of summary layer models; this enables business and IT managers and technical professionals to reach a consensus on how to best describe and manage key components and their interrelationships without overwhelming participants in the process.
Reference models serve as a starting point for defining enterprise-unique service delivery requirements. By adapting standard, out-of-the-book solutions, your organization can start speaking a common language and then integrate internal best practices with industry best practices to ensure that any existing competitive advantage is retained and exploited. Additionally, the use of reference models enables an incremental approach to adopting a robust framework that can later be modified without a large initial front-end investment.
To successfully use models to attain better alignment, follow these five steps:
- Identify your goals: What are you trying to achieve?
Reduced equipment expenditures
Business process optimization
Service desk centralization - Determine where you want to be—include TOGAF and ITIL reference models in your analysis.
- Determine where you are—map both your current business and IT processes.
- Identify the gaps and the solutions required to close them.
- Develop and deploy the solutions.
By standardizing IT services and integrating their use through effective business processes, your enterprise will drive support costs down while increasing responsiveness. ITIL provides the service portfolio definitions, and the change, release, and configuration management processes to manage these services. TOGAF provides the standards, framework, and context for determining cross- organizational impacts in planning and governance. Together they establish an approach to use managed service delivery and ensure business and IT alignment.
Achieving business and IT alignment reduces the risks associated with business and technology change, increases the ROI attained by both process improvement and technology projects, and provides an enterprise-wide understanding of the interactions of strategy, business processes, and information technologies—thus, enabling coordination of strategy, development, and service delivery at all levels within the enterprise.
Integration and adoption of these frameworks within an infrastructure and collaborative environment to support them will go a long way to ensure that business and IT alignment will no longer need to be the top priority for CIOs in the coming years.
by Keith Mangold (kmangold@metastorm.com), a principal consultant with Metastorm, specializing in enterprise architecture and IT service management methodologies.
